Lucas Rayan
b4a85722a6
9.5 KiB
Roadmap
Where Guará has been, where it is and where it is going. What is marked as done exists in the code and has a test; what is planned is intent, not a promise, and has no date.
Legend: ✅ done · 🟡 partial · 🔜 planned · 🔭 long-term idea · ⛔ out of scope
Principles that do not change
- The source is read-only. Nothing in the core writes to the device being recovered.
- Do not ship without validating. A feature only lands with a test against a real or reference image. That is why ReFS and Storage Spaces do not exist yet: there is no reference image to check against.
- Honest confidence. If the content could not be checked, confidence is low or medium, never high.
- Free and auditable. Open source (MIT or Apache-2.0), no telemetry, and every result can be reproduced.
History
| Version | Date | Milestone |
|---|---|---|
| 0.1.0 | 2026-10-18 | Read-only core, MBR/GPT, NTFS, FAT, exFAT, structure-aware carving, forensic image, sessions, CLI and interface |
| 0.2.0 | 2026-10-18 | Full preview (image, video, audio, PDF, Office, ZIP, hex) and themes |
| 0.3.0 | 2026-10-18 | Explorer with thumbnails, metadata (EXIF, GPS), hashes, disk search, CSV, HTML report and duplicates |
| 0.4.0 | 2026-10-18 | Disk reconnection, automatic sessions, organization when recovering |
| 0.5.0 | 2026-10-18 | SQLite viewer with deleted rows, SMART, English interface, recovery resume |
| 0.6.0 | 2026-10-18 | Full disk health (ATA and NVMe SMART), guara health, new logo |
| 1.0.0 | 2026-10-19 | ext4, HFS+, Btrfs, XFS, APFS; BitLocker, LUKS, FileVault 2; RAID and LVM; E01, Ex01, AFF4; fragmented JPEG; MP4 without moov |
| 1.0.1 | 2026-10-20 | Documentation in English with Portuguese translations, complete English interface, screenshots, Docker image of the CLI |
| 1.1.0 | 2026-10-20 | Core messages and dates in English, automated translation check, RustCrypto on digest 0.11, verified Docker device access and Superset workspaces |
Details of each version in the CHANGELOG.
Current status (1.1.0) against what is expected from a forensic suite
1. File systems with metadata
| Item | Status | Note |
|---|---|---|
| NTFS, FAT12/16/32, exFAT | ✅ | Since 0.1.0. NTFS skips compressed and EFS files |
| ext2/3/4 | ✅ | Deleted inodes and old copies in the journal |
| HFS+ | ✅ | Tree node leftovers and journal |
| Btrfs | ✅ | Old versions of the trees; zlib, zstd and lzo extents |
| XFS | ✅ | Freed inodes and names of freed entries. Tested only with simulated deletion |
| APFS | 🟡 | Container, object map, snapshots and old nodes. Free-space map is missing; deletion tested only in simulation |
| ReFS | 🔜 | Only detected today; recovery depends on carving. Reference image missing |
| Storage Spaces | 🔜 | Not done. Reference image missing |
| NTFS: compressed attributes, EFS, attribute list | 🔜 | Marked as incomplete today |
| XFS and APFS validation with real deletion | 🔜 | Replace the simulation with images from real devices |
2. Encrypted volumes
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| BitLocker (password, recovery key, .BEK, clear key) | ✅ |
| LUKS1 and LUKS2 | ✅ |
| FileVault 2 (Core Storage) | ✅ |
| FileVault 2 on APFS with an encrypted volume | 🔜 |
| Key from memory (hibernation, RAM dump) | 🔭 |
| Dictionary and brute-force attacks (BitLocker, LUKS, FileVault, RAR, ZIP and other encrypted volumes/files) | 🔜 |
Today Guará opens volumes when you already have the password or key. Password recovery by dictionary and brute force (with a GPU, like Hashcat) is a planned feature, central to forensic use.
3. Forensic images
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| Raw image (dd) tolerant of bad sectors, with an error map | ✅ |
E01 and Ex01: read, write and guara verify |
✅ |
| AFF4: read and write | ✅ |
| Other containers (VMDK, VHD/VHDX, QCOW2, DMG) | 🔜 |
| Mobile device image (see item 7) | 🔭 |
4. Assembling loose disks
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 10 and linear (mdadm), including degraded | ✅ |
| Automatic discovery of level, stripe size, layout and order without metadata | ✅ |
| LVM2 (linear, striped, mirrored and RAID) | ✅ |
| Storage Spaces | 🔜 |
| Multi-disk Btrfs and ZFS (the file system's own RAID) | 🔭 |
| Proprietary controller RAID (Dell PERC, HP Smart Array) | 🔭 |
5. Carving
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| Detection by real structure, with exact size and confidence | ✅ Since 0.1.0 (JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, PDF, ZIP and derivatives, MP4/MOV/HEIC, AVI/WAV/WebP, SQLite, 7z, OLE, MP3, PE) and, in 1.0.0, 24 more (gzip, zstd, Matroska/WebM, Ogg, MPEG-TS, FLV, ASF, MIDI, RAR, ar, SWF, ELF, TIFF, ICO, Windows registry, EVTX, PST, RTF, pcap and others) |
| Fragmented JPEG reassembled (up to three fragments) | ✅ |
MP4/MOV without moov rebuilt (H.264 and HEVC) from a reference video |
✅ |
| Fragments: more than three, and formats beyond JPEG (PNG, DOC, ZIP, SQLite) | 🔜 |
Video reconstruction without a reference, audio in MP4 without moov, drone and action camera videos in other containers |
🔜 |
| More formats validated by structure | 🔜 ongoing |
6. Artifact interpretation
Guará identifies and recovers these files, but only interprets some of them.
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| SQLite database: schema, tables, blobs, dates and deleted rows | ✅ |
| Metadata: EXIF and GPS, PDF, Office and OpenDocument, MP4/MOV | ✅ |
Carving of Windows registry (regf), EVTX, PST, pcap |
🟡 only recognizes and recovers, does not interpret |
| Interpret the Windows registry (users, programs, USB, execution history) | 🔜 |
| Browser history, cookies and downloads (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) | 🔜 built on the SQLite reader |
| Messages, contacts and location from apps (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and others) | 🔜 built on the SQLite reader |
| System logs and Windows events (EVTX) | 🔜 |
| Unified timeline of all artifacts | 🔜 |
7. Mobile device extraction
Here the leap is one of kind, not of feature. Today Guará works with storage media.
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| Android through ADB and backups | 🔭 |
| iOS through iTunes or Finder backups (including password-encrypted ones) | 🔭 |
| Physical access through bootloader and chip exploits | 🔭 |
Physical access is the differentiator of commercial tools like Cellebrite. It depends on full-time vulnerability research teams, and many of those techniques cannot be published as open source, which makes this the most distant item on the roadmap. The closest direction is to read what the user or examiner can legitimately export (backups and ADB) and interpret that data with item 6; physical access by exploit stays as a long-term idea, to pursue as the project grows.
8. Chain of custody and validity in court
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 of every file, of the image and of the device | ✅ |
guara-manifesto.json manifest in every recovery |
✅ |
| HTML report with case, examiner, source, partitions, summary and hashes | ✅ |
| Verification of an E01/Ex01 image against the stored hash | ✅ |
| Audit log of every examiner action (who, when, what) | 🔜 |
| Digitally signed reports and a timestamped manifest | 🔜 |
| Reproducibility: replay the recorded procedure and get the same result | 🔜 |
| PDF report | 🔜 |
| External validation: NIST CFTT (Computer Forensic Tool Testing) tests and publication of the results | 🔭 |
| Signed binaries (Windows and macOS) | 🔜 |
External validation is what makes a report accepted. Without it, Guará is good for triage, recovery and support, and the examiner must check the results by other means.
9. Analysis
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| Text search across the whole disk, UTF-8 and UTF-16, including free space | ✅ guara search |
| Duplicate detection | ✅ |
| Regular expression and keyword search in file content (Office, PDF, e-mail) | 🔜 |
| Known hashes: NSRL to ignore system files | 🔜 |
| Hash lists of illicit material (imported by the examiner) | 🔜 |
| Image detection by content (similarity, classification) | 🔭 |
| OCR on scanned images and PDFs | 🔭 |
10. Platform and distribution
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| CLI and interface for Windows, Linux and macOS | ✅ |
| CI on three systems, automatic release by tag | ✅ |
| Tests with real images on Windows and macOS (Linux only today) | 🔜 |
| GUI: privileged helper process instead of restarting the whole app as administrator | 🔜 |
| Signed and notarized binaries | 🔜 |
| Packages in package managers (winget, Homebrew, Flatpak) | 🔭 |
Suggested next milestones
No dates, in the order that makes the most sense.
1.1: trust and custody Audit log, PDF report, signed manifest, APFS free-space map, XFS and APFS validation with real deletions, tests with real images on Windows and macOS.
1.2: analysis NSRL and hash lists, search in file content, unified timeline.
1.3: artifacts Windows registry, browsers, EVTX and the most common messaging apps, built on the SQLite reader.
1.4: more structure ReFS and Storage Spaces (once there is a reference image), other image containers (VMDK, VHD, QCOW2), expanded fragmented carving.
2.0: mobile devices and validation iTunes backups, ADB and Android backups; submission to the NIST CFTT tests.
How to help
The most common bottleneck is a reference image: a ReFS volume, a Storage Spaces pool or an XFS with real deletion, preferably small and without personal data. If you have one, open an issue. See also CONTRIBUTING.